Shadowing Practice: The Entry-Level Job Crisis - Learn English Speaking with Video

For the past three years, U.S unemployment has been slowly creeping upwards.

4.3% may not sound all that bad,

but the problem is highly concentrated among one specific population — young people.

New entrants to the labor market — mostly recent college graduates — represent 85% of the rise in unemployment since mid-2023,

according to Oxford Economics.

85%.

In a cruel twist of irony, the class of 2026 enrolled in college back in 2022, a year of record high job openings.

Seeing soaring wages and ubiquitous now-hiring signs,

they racked up thousands of dollars in student loans on the then-safe assumption work would be plentiful.

Now, four years later, they find themselves graduating into an unprecedented entry-level job crisis.

The average number of applications required to secure an entry-level job tripled between 2022 and 2025 alone.

From 1 to 300.

Imagine writing 300 cover letters, all for a mere 50% chance of finding a job.

And more than half of all applicants now spend at least six months looking for work.

As surprise becomes frustration, becomes desperation, some even resort to paying for jobs.

In a recent Bloomberg story, parents admit spending as much as $50,000 on career coaches to get their adult children out of the house.

Another article explains a new trend called reverse recruiting,

wherein applicants pay a recruiter thousands of dollars a month to help introduce them to potential employers.

are giving up entirely.

Grad school applications are surging as young people opt to roll the dice again, betting double or nothing that more education will solve their problems.

Now, some of this is just the inevitable long-term trend we've previously covered.

As the share of Americans with a college degree has increased, its value as a differentiator, naturally, has declined.

But the abruptness and scale of this crisis suggests there's also something else going on.

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Now, the obvious culprit, of course, is AI.

At first glance, the data seems to confirm this.

AI, in its current form, is most relevant to entry-level, white-collar office jobs.

The exact kind that are now hardest to come by.

Tech and programming jobs in particular have been among the hardest hit by recent layoffs, and are also the tasks that AI tools most excel at.

Besides, companies are quite open about this.

Amazon, for instance, cited AI when it laid off 14,000 corporate positions last fall.

Still, there's good reason for skepticism.

For one, companies understand their audience — investors.

Mass layoffs can indicate trouble, or they can indicate efficiency.

So it's not surprising that Amazon tried to make the case for the latter, saying in a press release that AI was enabling it to quote, innovate much faster than ever before.

Gesturing vaguely toward a macroeconomic trend or technology is a blameless,

largely non-falsifiable explanation for what could otherwise look like incompetence or mismanagement.

But the biggest flaw in the AI explanation is that we aren't actually seeing that many layoffs.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Compared to the three years before the pandemic, about a hundred thousand fewer people are laid off in a typical month today.

Layoffs are noticeably down, not up.

And strangely, so is everything.

Hiring, firing, quitting, it's all way down.

So how do we make sense of this frozen labor market?

One where the good metrics and the bad alike have fallen.

Everything begins to make sense once we zoom out a little bit further.

For clarity, let's also normalize these few months during the onset of the pandemic, when much of the country exited and quickly re-entered the labor market.

Recall that, after the initial shock, consumer demand actually spiked.

Americans received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks, at the same time they were stuck at home looking for distractions.

They adopted a new puppy, or three, upgraded their home office, and stockpiled essentials.

To keep up with all this demand, companies needed more help than ever.

Yet that help became harder to find.

The pandemic drastically increased what economists call the reservation wage, the minimum people are willing to work for.

Death and tragedy forced salarymen to reflect on their life's priorities.

Stimulus checks decreased the burden of unemployment.

Meanwhile, health risks and regulations increased the costs of in-person interaction.

As the balance of power shifted from employer to employee, the latter quite sensibly exploited this leverage.

Each and every week for two whole years, nearly a million Americans quit their jobs, in what became known as the Great Resignation.

Companies responded to this dilemma, that is, extremely high demand for labor,

yet extremely low supply, by treating it as the scarce and valuable commodity it was.

They tried to hoard it.

Better to have too much of it than not enough.

Only unused labor, after all, was labor withheld from your competitors.

Thus, the unprecedented boom in hiring you see here.

More people were hired between January and November of 2021 than this entire period between 2014 and 2020.

Six years' worth of net hiring took place in the span of just 10 months.

Eventually, however, life returned to normal, and companies found themselves with all this extra labor they no longer needed.

In more ordinary times, they may have simply laid them off.

Some did.

There have been a few high-profile layoffs in the tech industry, for example.

That's not surprising.

As you can see, Big Tech hired even more aggressively during the Great Resignation than other industries, here.

Which means it's now due for a much bigger correction.

This, by the way, was the release of ChatGPT, notably after the correction had already begun.

Although that's not to say AI hasn't played some role in more recent tech layoffs.

Programming is one area where AI tools have had a more direct, immediate, and measurable impact.

Overall, however, layoffs have been down.

And you can see why.

Only a few short years ago, companies paid a sizable premium to hoard the labor they have now.

They're scared to give it up and risk being caught in the same unenviable position.

Especially because they're unsure about the future.

Hiring, you see, is surprisingly expensive.

Even a minimum wage service position may cost thousands of dollars to fill.

Job postings, background checks, interviews, orientations, legal costs add up fast.

When you add in the extended training periods required of skilled, white-collar work, and the lost productivity of their colleagues doing the training,

it can take many months or even years for a new hire to turn net positive.

In other words, hiring is ultimately a prediction about the future.

Where will the economy be in 3, 6, or 12 months when this new worker starts paying for themselves?

And as of now, companies have no idea where the economy will be tomorrow, never mind in 12 months.

Since the two main candidates in the 24 presidential election had such starkly different priorities,

hiring managers were likely waiting until then to see what would happen.

But the uncertainty never subsided.

Instead, they watched as tariffs were repeatedly applied, then struck down.

wars were started and the global oil market was disrupted.

The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its third-highest point since the Federal Reserve began reporting in 1985,

eclipsed, and even then only briefly, by the first months of the pandemic and the Great Recession.

American companies are so unsure about whether they should invest in the near future

that they're beginning to hire an increasing number of temporary workers.

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This is not, in other words, really about young people or entry-level jobs.

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The entire labor market is frozen.

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Think of it as a game of musical chairs.

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Employers and employees alike are so terrified that the number of chairs is declining, that the opportunities are scarce,

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and so uncertain about when the music will stop next, that they're paralyzed in place, whether they like their current chair or not.

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The average American believes they have only a 46% chance of securing a new job within three months

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if they were to quit today.

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Likewise, many companies assume AI is on the verge of reshaping their industry, but aren't yet sure how or when.

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While very few outside the tech sector have made cuts as a direct result of AI, many more have frozen hiring in anticipation of that disruption.

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These are brutal conditions for those unhappy with the chair they've got.

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If you don't like your current job, you're sorta stuck.

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That's a terrible feeling.

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And employers know this.

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Some are capitalizing on this anxiety,

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taking the opportunity to roll back many of the worker-friendly policies won back in 2022 during the Great Resignation, when workers had the upper hand.

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Everything from vacation days to healthcare and remote work flexibility is being reduced.

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The share of U.S employers offering paid family leave is now decreasing.

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A few are even introducing new rules, like making their staff lock their personal phones in secure pouches during the workday.

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But things are far, far worse for those with no chair to begin with.

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With so little churn in the labor market, fresh graduates are locked outside, waiting, with little to do as the interest on their student loans accumulates.

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It's no wonder many young people aren't exactly big fans of AI.

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They're already paying for the price of its anticipated disruption, even where companies aren't yet benefiting from it at their expense.

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So how does this end?

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One possibility, of course, is that it ends very abruptly, with a recession.

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We've seen this movie before.

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Rising unemployment depresses economic confidence, which drives down consumer spending, which in turn reinforces the unemployment.

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Throw AI into the mix, widespread layoffs either from actual disruption or the bursting of an AI bubble,

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and there's no telling how bad things could get.

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But, there's some reason to think this time might be different.

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And not in a good way.

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Take another look at this graph of unemployment, now going back to 1956.

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Clearly, booms and busts are quite common.

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They always follow the same pattern.

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suddenly skyrockets, here, then slowly falls, here, until the cycle repeats.

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But not this time.

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Something strange has happened over the past three years.

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For the first time, unemployment isn't skyrocketing, nor is it slowly falling.

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It's just steadily creeping upwards.

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Which suggests a second, perhaps even scarier possibility.

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That we're not on the verge of a recession.

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That this is just a new, long-term normal.

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That the U.S labor market is becoming less dynamic.

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That uncertainty is taking root, making Americans more risk-averse in general.

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The United States is one of the only countries in the world with at-will employment.

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Meaning employers can fire anyone, at any time, for any reason, with just a few exceptions like racial discrimination.

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You can devote your entire 40-year career to a single company, and unless your contract says otherwise,

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they can tell you to clean out your office by lunchtime on any random Tuesday.

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Almost no one is truly secure.

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The rationale for this policy is a simple trade-off.

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On one hand, American workers are fired more often and less compassionately.

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On the other hand, they're also hired faster and in greater numbers.

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The very fact that companies know they can quickly

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and easily let someone go enables them to so quickly and eagerly bring them in.

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In the short term, yes, this churn is incredibly disruptive.

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Losing your job is one of the most traumatic things that can afflict a person, especially given that it's tied to your healthcare here in the States.

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But in the long term, in a well-functioning economy, this leads to better matching between employer and employee.

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The latter can freely quit a job they don't like, knowing they can quickly find a new one.

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And employers can find the right candidate, increasing their productivity.

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This has surely played some role in America's unparalleled economic success.

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companies are bolder, faster, and more innovative than their European or Japanese competitors.

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It's not always a fair system, in fact, it's often quite barbaric.

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But there's at least an argument to be made that the very real benefits outweigh the very real costs, even to any individual worker.

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But that trade-off is now unraveling.

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The cost of at-will employment hasn't changed.

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The law still gives employers the freedom to swiftly dispose of their workers.

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Yet the benefits, the freedom employees have to quickly and easily change jobs, are quickly disappearing.

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That leaves us with the worst of both worlds.

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Getting fired is easy, getting hired increasingly less so.

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We're left with all of the vulnerability, yet too little of the freedom.

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And this is more than a mere annoyance.

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It threatens the very foundation of America's incredible economic success.

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Consider why American consumers spend so much and save so little.

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We're confident about the future, and until recently, rightly so.

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Being secure in and optimistic about our careers, we take bold risks, shop compulsively, and invest in our futures.

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The American addiction to high-interest credit cards,

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student loans, and 30-year mortgages seems incredibly reckless given how quickly we can lose our livelihoods.

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This faith in our ability to repay our massive debt decades into the future only makes sense

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when you account for how easily we can find new work.

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opportunity abounds.

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But what happens when that's no longer true?

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The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment since 1960, and as of this year, it's now at an all-time low.

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Not during the lowest depths of the Great Recession, pandemic, or even 1970s oil crisis,

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when gas was rationed and the federal speed limit was lowered to 50 miles an hour to save on energy, energy, were Americans as pessimistic as they are today?

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This is truly uncharted territory.

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And the longer this uncertainty continues, the more households will factor this into their spending.

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Meanwhile, the less we spend, the less wealth and opportunity will be created.

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Today, we face an entry-level job crisis.

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But this should concern all of us, because tomorrow, we could be facing much, much more.

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And if you're feeling pessimistic, Planet Wild offers the perfect antidote.

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Planet Wild is a community of over 25,000 members that funds different organizations each month to help solve a specific environmental problem.

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Whether it's reintroducing a species to its habitat, restoring a forest, or cleaning up the world's oceans.

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They then document their progress on YouTube, so you and I can see the impact we're making.

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After all, what better way to handle today's uncertainty than by making a certain difference in the world, all for less than a cup of coffee.

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What I love about Planet Wild is

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that it replaces giant impossible goals like achieving net-zero emissions —

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which frankly sound to me a bit idealistic — with concrete achievable projects called missions.

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First, they identify a specific problem.

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In the February mission, for instance, they explained how grizzly bears in North America struggle in fragmented wildlife areas,

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posing a great danger both to their lives and to ours.

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And second, they tell you exactly how the partner organization is helping, and the exact amount contributed by the Planet Wild community.

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In this case, the project was to connect those areas by building tunnels

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and fencing systems on a huge wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon, allowing bears and all kinds of different species to cross highways safely.

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The Planet Wild community contributed a total of 50,056 euros, and we got to watch it happen right here on YouTube.

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Planet Wild is committed to never making a profit from its rewilding membership, and already has loads of successful projects under its belt.

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If you're ready to start making a difference, you can click the link in the description or scan the QR code on-screen and start giving whatever amount you can, big or small.

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The first hundred people to join with the code POLY6 will even have their first month paid for,

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so you can try it for 30 days and cancel any time you need.

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Thanks again to Planet Wild for partnering with us for this video.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: The Entry-Level Job Crisis - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?